Seventy-two percent do not have an automated process to replace compromised certificates if their CA vendor is compromised. In the case of a CA compromise, every minute counts. Finding all affected certificates manually can take days or weeks, but not replacing them immediately can incur significant costs and in the worst case scenario results in a company going out of business.

Forty-four percent of these respondents acknowledged that they were worried, but had not yet re-evaluated their CA compromise and related business continuity strategies, while only 17 percent had.

Venafi Inc., the inventor and market leader of enterprise key and certificate management (EKCM) solutions, in conjunction with Osterman Research, recently released the results of an extensive survey designed to determine how well organizations understand the risks associated with poor key and certificate management. Based on responses from 174 IT and information-security professionals, the survey reveals a significant lack of knowledge, understanding and oversight, resulting in a series of information-security vulnerabilities.

Fifty-four percent of respondents, for example, admit to having an inaccurate or incomplete inventory of their Secure Socket Layers (SSL) certificate populations. Deploying encryption solutions without maintaining comprehensive certificate and key inventories is a worst practice that jeopardizes vital business systems and processes and exposes organizations to substantial risk of security and compliance incidents.

"The importance of sound certificate management practices is highlighted by the repeated certificate authority (generally referred to as CA) breaches over the past year," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "We were startled by the lack of urgency regarding the issue. When considered in tandem with the high-value target CAs represent to hackers, we can predict more CA breaches and more security threats than we saw in 2011."

"Organizations protect mission-critical and often regulated data with hundreds or thousands of encryption keys and digital certificates," said Jeff Hudson, Venafi CEO. "But as this survey reveals, too many companies have inaccurate or incomplete data about their security assets. The unquantified and unmanaged risks these certificates and keys pose is significant — risks magnified through the increasingly pervasive use in corporate data centers, cloud-based systems and mobile devices."